'Hi __________. My name is _________. I'm your ________ sales person calling to introduce myself. I would like to talk to you about what we have to offer.'

The above is an actual message that was left on my voice mail. I did not call back. Would you? Probably not.

Let me state up front that I'm still not a big fan of leaving messages. Having a conversation with your prospect is always so much better, and with some skill and patience it is possible toeventually get most prospects on the telephone.

If, however, you choose to leave a message, you must give your prospect some reason to call you back. 'I would like to talk to you about what we have to offer' does not cut it.

When you are speaking with your prospect for the first time, it is imperative to have a hook, something to grab and hold that prospect's attention. If you don't hook your prospect in thebeginning of your conversation, they will not want to speak with you. They will say, 'I'm not interested,' and worse case, they may hang up on you.

It works exactly the same way when you are leaving a message. If you don't have a hook, if your message does not grab and hold your prospect's attention, your prospect will hit delete and that will be that.

The process for finding your hook, whether for your actual conversation or for your message, is always the same. You want to identify hot buttons, those issues that are so important toyour prospect that when they come up, your prospect stops in her tracks to listen. Every single message that you leave must have a hook. And if you plan on leaving more than one message, you will want to have different hooks. (And BTW: If you really want to reach your prospect, you will need to leave more than one message.) This way you will always be saying something new.

Start by making a list. List every benefit and value that youand/or your products/services bring to your customers. Once you have that list, create a message for each benefit/value. You can have more than one message about any one benefit/value, as long as you have another angle or another point that you can make. When you are done, you should have several different generic messages that you could then leave for your prospect. Once you've developed your generic messages, you can then customize them for any particular prospect.